Biography

Understanding that it would be ‘a trouble rather than a service’ to pay his duty to the King in Holland in 1660, Throckmorton remained in England, and was knighted at Rochester during Charles II’s progress to London. Lord Herbert of Raglan (Henry Somerset) made him deputy warden of the Forest of Dean and recommended him to Lady Englefield for a by-election at Wootton Bassett in the following month. He was involved in a double return with Sir Walter St. John, but he had taken his seat by the beginning of August, when he and Herbert were in the Speaker’s chamber and missed a division. An inactive Member of the Convention, he was named to only four committees, including those for reducing the rate of interest to 6 per cent and preserving the timber in the Forest of Dean.4

Throckmorton is not known to have stood in 1661, but was returned unopposed for the county with Lord Herbert’s support on his father’s father’s death. A moderately active Member, he was named to 67 committees in the Cavalier Parliament, and was prominent in matters affecting timber. He was appointed in October 1667 to the committees of inquiry into the sale of Dunkirk and the accusations against Lord Mordaunt; but at the same time he was one of seven Members ordered to bring in a bill for the supply of timber, and five days later to hear the petition of Sir John Winter, a Roman Catholic courtier who was also a leading Gloucestershire ironmaster. The timber bill, providing for enclosures in the Forest of Dean, was committed on 2 Dec. He acted as teller against the adjournment on 14 Dec. in order that Sir John Weld’s bill might receive a second reading, and two days later together with Sir Trevor Williams presented a petition concerning a debt of £2,000 owed by the Earl of Cleveland, who had mortgaged part of his estate to Weld. On 11 Feb. 1668 he urged the House to refer Winter’s petition to the Court of Exchequer, as there were only half a dozen commoners of the forest in London, and the House agreed on condition that the committee should reconsider the case after judgment. He took over from William Harbord as chairman of the committee for the Forest of Dean bill, and was ordered to consider a proviso about mines and quarries, but successfully resisted an application from Winter to be heard at the bar of the House, and the bill was engrossed. He was appointed to the committee for the conventicles bill four days later. On the third reading of the timber bill he opposed a proviso to exclude deer from the new enclosures, urging that the matter should be left to the King’s pleasure, and the bill passed without a division. He appears to have been popular with the colliers of the Forest, who promised to give him priority as a customer, and elected him a free miner, but his attempt to make good a grant of crown rights in Kingswood chase led to violence, in which several of his followers narrowly escaped with their lives.5

Throckmorton’s name appears on both lists of the court party in 1669-71. At the opening of the spring session of 1675 he proposed a vote of thanks for the speech from the throne. He was appointed to the committee for hindering Papists from sitting in either House, as well as to another for the preservation of the Forest of Dean. He received the government whip in the autumn; but in the following year Sir Richard Wiseman noted: ‘I cannot be very secure of this gentleman, for he will not do much out of honesty; but he may be secured otherwise’. It was alleged in Flagellum Parliamentarium that he had received £300 p.a. in land, probably a reference to the Kingswood chase grant; but his most substantial reward seems to have been a payment from the excise in 1677 of £150 His name appears on the working lists, and he was marked ‘thrice vile’ by Shaftesbury. He was included among the government speakers, although no further speeches have been recorded, and on both lists of the court party in 1678. Although clearly an Anglican, the Quakers thought him worth lobbying for toleration. But he is unlikely to have stood for the Exclusion Parliaments, and was buried at Clerkenwell on 31 July 1681. The baronetcy became extinct when his cousin was killed in a duel in the following year.6